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On being responsive

In 2011 A Book Apart released a little yellow book that shook the web design world off it’s feet. Ethan Marcotte wrote about something he’d been playing with for a while… responsive web design. Combining excisting technologies like fluid grids, flexible images and, most important, media queries he came up with a new way of designing and building web sites that work and look good on any device. This new way of thinking no longer forced us to create different sites for desktop and mobile, no longer is there a reason to maintain a separate m. site for your “on-the-go” users.

So, we’re two years down the road since Ethan’s book was released and Responsive Web Design is passed it’s buzz-word phase. But that doesn’t mean that everything is solved. Basically we’re just coming to grips with it, and Sarah Parmenter stated that very nicely (at least I think so) when in her talk at Responsive Day Out she said that “we’ve all been winging it” so far.

I was lucky enough to watch that talk, and many more on the subject of Responsive Web Design at Responsive Day Out in Brighton, in person and learned so much that day. It made me actually feel quite relieved that I wasn’t the only one struggling with all the different aspects about web design and all the stuff we have to keep up with. On the conference site you can find audio for all the talks given and also some links to slides.

Sarah’s and Laura Kalbag‘s talks stuck with me the most because they gave some great examples how to adapt my day-to-day workflow to a Responsive Design workflow. But also other talks, like Mark Boulton and Owen Gregory gave, that we’re a bit less practical but very inspiring, are very much worth checking out.